Thoughts on family, faith & film.

horror

Having had my encounter with Christ after the turbulent teens were behind, I still regret the attitudes, behaviors and general assholishness on display back then. While you could explain part of the rebel in me as rooted in a broken family dynamic, I must also take personal responsibility for my actions. This admission of guilt is tough to find in movies, where everybody is the hero of their own stories. And before you think that I must have walked into the wrong movie since I am talking about teenage angst in a post that should be about killer maniacs, let me assure you that no, I did watch a flick about insane deviants running around hacking people to death.

The main characters are teenagers, and while they are a living embodiment of a cliche, there’s also genuine emotion to them. They’re flawed and scared, but also capable of much good, even if it proves too little too late. That’s something I can definitely relate to.

B

The stereotypes mainstream audiences may have regarding French cinema, i.e. overtly sexual, weird, twisted are checked off to a T in Raw, a movie about a horny, murderous, cannibalistic veterinary student.
It is as memorable as it is perturbing.

B

This movie features characters so overwhelmingly idiotic, so uncharacteristically infantile in their decision making, that you start to wonder whether it takes place in some alternate universe. One in which humanity never figured out the basics of the wheels.

B+

It’s uncommon to encounter horror flicks with well defined characters, with motivations that go beyond good and evil, and whose poor decisions, as must occur in every horror movie ever, are the product not of a screenwriter labeling them “DUMMY 1” and “DUMMY 2”, but of their own human nature.

B

It has been a while since I encountered a haunting a final shot as the one featured in The Blackcoat’s Daughter, a film with an atmosphere so eerie that you can almost sense a demon breathing behind your hair raised back.

B

The Devil’s Candy is a maniacally disturbing horror movie in which the devil is literally in the details. An art gallery by the name of Belial, a t-shirt that reads “Master of Puppets”, a hostess in a smoking skin tight red dress.
By placing the action in an environment in which the demon seems to have total dominion over, the proceedings feel disturbing as hell up until the very last shot, in which the skies clear, light shines and Satan appears to retreat, at least until next time.

B+

Is God Dead?, Time`s cover reads.
Perhaps it’s not so much that he is dead, as that the devil has never been more alive.
Indeed, throughout 130 minutes we are presented with a scenario so disturbing and full of despair that it feels like every character that appears on screen is another servant of the lord of darkness himself. Without a doubt one of the most depressingly sinister horror films I have ever seen, Rosemary’s Baby is that rare picture that made me want to shut it off halfway, not because it was bad, but because there is absolutely no hope for good to triumph over evil. Like my favorite horror movie, the masterful We Are What We Are, this movie does not rely on jump scares, or even evil entities popping up every other scene. Instead, it creates an atmosphere of intense dread and builds such immense suspense that I wanted to jump out of bed and run far away from my bedroom as possible, until I gathered my thoughts and remembered that whereas satanists use tannis root necklaces to keep them safe, I have God, who thankfully is not dead after all.

A

One of the most powerful and revealing moments in Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien comes when life long best friends Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) reveal to one another that they’ve been sleeping with each others girlfriends. This insight forces the viewer to reevaluate everything that preceded it, while at the same time turning the film from what was up until that point a funny road trip to a melancholy experience that will alter these two young men’s lives.

That a gimmicky horror film attempts to do that with a game of Never Have I Ever is formidable. That it mostly succeeds is memorable.

B

The impact of a movie dealing with the dangers of religious fanaticism is considerably lessened when it is revealed that it was not fanaticism at all, but God. The characters are not creepy anymore, but enlightened.